Many gun and rifle aficionados enjoy preparing their own ammunition for tournaments, target shooting and hunting. The equipment currently used for automatically aligning and/or joining bullets to the respective casings comprises a progressive reloading press. The bullet and the shell casing are usually aligned and fixed in place by hand, one at a time. A lever mechanism is actuated for joining the two parts.
In order to save on the cost of ammunition preparation, shell casings are often used more than once. Such multiple reloadings are fraught with safety problems, since wear and tear, as well as ammunition explosions, frequently distort the shell casings. When a shell casing is distorted, there is obviously difficulty in aligning it with a new bullet; such distorted casings are generally resized and trimmed. It therefore becomes necessary to exert extra care in the preparation and alignment of the bullet, as well as the handling thereof. If proper tolerance and alignment are not observed, there is danger that the newly-formed ammunition may cause damage or injury to both the shooter and the gun itself.
Current press devices are usually constructed to unite only certain sizes of bullet and shell case.
An apparatus that could provide an automatic means for placing and aligning the bullet within the shell casing to a close tolerance would be quite welcome to the amateur. Such an apparatus would provide a much faster process than is currently available, as well as one having an extra margin of safety.
It is also desirable that such a device utilize the already existing press loading equipment, so that the cost of reloading would not be appreciably increased.
In addition, such an invention would be advantageous to those enthusiasts having more than one firearm, if the device were able to process and load bullets and shells of varying sizes.
The present invention seeks to achieve all of the above cited objectives, as well as other objectives which will become more apparent with reference to the subsequent, detailed description.